Three Tips to Sell a Home Fast

When you’re selling your home, the last thing you want is for it to languish on the market for months. But how do you ensure that doesn’t happen? How do you both sell your home fast, and still be sure you’re getting what it’s worth? These three tips help to answer questions.

Superb Staging

Staging a home for sale isn’t easy. Depending on the state of your home when you want to sell it, the workload can be considerable. All that being said, homes that are staged well tend to sell faster than those that aren’t.

When you’re going to begin showing your home to prospective buyers, make sure you repaint anything that needs to be done. Change the carpets (if needed), polish/finish floors and remove personal items and extraneous pieces of furniture.

Things like book shelves, end tables, coffee tables, picture frames, posters, etc. all need to go. You can leave some large items like a couch or bed, but you want to show enough empty space so that buyers can envision their own items in these areas.

Perfect Pricing

The true market value of a home can’t be known until it’s sold. But the homes in your area usually fall within a similar price range. Try pricing the home on the lower end of the price range. This may seem counter-intuitive, but if your home seems like a deal relative to the other homes in the area, it’s sure to attract more buyers.

With multiple offers, buyers can then up their bids in the hopes of getting the home – sometimes resulting in a sale price above the price range of similar properties. Be careful with this, though, as it can also backfire. When you under-price your home, you have to be willing to accept that sale price.

Disclose Damages

It’s of the utmost importance that you’re honest with the seller up front. Most of the time, real estate disclosures happen when the home is in escrow. Sometimes, a seller will discover things they don’t like at that time and lose confidence in the seller. Also, some buyers choose to have their own inspections done.

If this happens, and the person they hire to inspect the home finds that you didn’t disclose something, they’ll think your dishonest and trying to cheat them. If that happens, you can forget selling to them.

Selling a home fast on your own is doable, but if you want to take the stress and workload out of your hands, talk with a real estate investor about options.

Peter is a co-creator of The Flipping Formula. He also founded CityLight Homes, a premier real estate investing firm in New England. He is an internationally recognized real estate investing expert, appearing on national news outlets such as CNBC, CNN, and CBS. Together with his business partner Dave Seymour, Peter starred in A&E's hit reality TV show Flipping Boston.